Sylvia Martin, Ink In her Veins: The Troubled Life of Aileen Palmer, University of Western Australia Press, 2016.

It is difficult to not turn away when someone’s life is not working out well. It’s easier to shun. Work colleagues, unable to cope with difficult behaviours, might ease the person from their midst. A family might banish that brother, sister, son or daughter to a silent place. When respectability is everything mental distress can shake to the core.

Sylvia Martin takes us into these shadowy silences in her biography of Aileen Palmer, a translator and talented poet and novelist. Plagued by mental illness during the second half of her life- or was it, in part, the mental distress of wartime trauma? – Palmer never truly flourished as a writer despite the talent of her youth. Instead she remained within the protective cowl of her family: her parents, the writers Vance and Nettie Palmer and her sister, Helen Palmer. Regarded on a par with royalty in the Australian literary world from the 1930s the Palmers moved with socialistic, communistic elite. They held a central place in Melbourne’s literary circles which included Clem Christesen, the founder editor of the journal Meanjin, his wife, Russian born, Nina Maximov Christesen who launched the study of Russion and Slavonic Studies at the University of Melbourne and the historian Brian Fitzpatrick . Nettie Palmer’s biography of the writer, Henry Handel Richardson certainly underlined Richardson’s importance as an Australian author who centred her work on the colonial experience and the vexed question of identity. The author Katherine Susannah Pritchard was a presence in Palmer family life – and a mentor to Aileen. Vance Palmer’s books: The Passage published in 1930 and The Rainbow-Bird and Other Stories, published in 1957 sold more than 50,000 copies each between 1959 and 1974. The Passage found its way onto high school reading lists. Helen Palmer, an educationalist, sometimes poet and, along with her sister, a member of the Communist Party , also has a place in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, in a biographical written by fellow Communist Party member, Robin Gollan a historian of the Australian left. Aileen, it seems, was put away. Until Sylvia Martin found her.

Aileen Palmer was born in 1915, Helen in 1917. At the time her parents were struggling to make their living from writing. Neither had an independent income: both came from middle class families. Nettie’s own background centred upon the Baptist Church where good deeds were prized over monetary gain. Vance’s family valued respectability and decency. Rebellion, if that was what it was, did not venture much beyond these bounds despite the couple’s professsed political radicalism. Neither entirely came to terms with Aileen’s choices including her sexuality. Both sisters appear to have struggled against the strictures of their parents’ iron grip. Aileen was the one who did not get away.

When Aileen was a small child the family moved to Queensland so Vance and Nettie could afford to live on their writing. During her teens she attended Presbyterian Ladies College in Kew, Melbourne, and went on to the University of Melbourne to study French literature along with German, Spanish and Russian. She graduated with a first class honors degree in French in 1935. All the while she wrote. Her semi autobiographical novel, ‘Poor Child’, was written during her late teens, explored her passion for a beautiful teacher – part of a rite of passage as she grew into adulthood. At university she was part of a friendship group of women whose political and literary views, if not their sexuality, appealed to her. Aileen was a young woman in formation – using the space that university life provided to explore ideas and identity.

After her graduation the Palmer family went first to England where Aileen immersed herself in the local politics. She travelled alone to Vienna working as a translator at the while Hitler’s fascism asserted its power. She rejoined her family in Barcelona at the time of the July 1936 insurrection. After her parents departure Aileen volunteered for the Communist led International Brigade and worked as an interpreter at the English Hospital at Granén on the Aragon Front. She returned to London, and drove ambulances during the Blitz. She appears to have had a serious love affair with ‘B’, who while never identified, appears to have been a woman. Nettie Palmer, her mother, may not have known about this even though, Martin notes, Aileen’s preference for women was clear.

Aileen’s years in Spain and London were the time of her life. It ended in 1945 when she returned, reluctantly, to Australia at her sister’s request after her mother suffered a mild stroke. Helen promptly moved to Sydney leaving Aileen with their parents in Melbourne – subject to their ways that stifled Aileen’s creativity and sexuality. Nor did the milieu in which she lived help. Aileen’s life was built upon the conventions, constraints and assumptions of elder daughterly duty. Unable to reconcile herself with unconscious strictures within her family’s life, Aileen broke down. She became an alcoholic; her mind snapped, and for the rest of her life she was admitted to hospital for long periods where she was treated with new and experimental forms of psychiatry. She attempted psychoanalysis and tried to write.

But this writing, unlike her juvenilia, was often designated the product of a mentally ill person with signs of manic behaviour (p. 276) and was not taken seriously. Martin does not agree with this view. Nor, eventually, did her sister who began to see the beauty in Aileen’s poetry, and the rhythms and cadences of her writing ( p. 276). Aileen was able to put her emotional experience into words, Martin says. Is it that the clumsiness of psychiatric treatment of the day has obscured talent? This is not to say that the treating psychiatrists were ignorant of such qualities in their patients. But good work has been lost even if talent has not been undermined. I have heard of paintings, given to carers in gratitude by such talented people, destroyed because they were thought of as ‘mad art’. Fortunately someone was wise enough to keep Aileen’s work and donate it to a library.

Martin’s archival mining has produced a number of Aileen’s poems including this one: ‘The dead have no regrets‘ read at the 2016 commemoration of the British and Irish volunteers who went to Spain from 1936 to 1939.

Maybe Aileen Palmer absorbed her mother’s ambivalence about the entire literary enterprise. Palmer had put aside her poetry Aileen was born. She hoped, too, that her daughter would not have ‘ink in her veins’ suggesting that her experience as an author had led her to conclude that a writer’s life was not a desirable one. Palmer continued to write and promote other authors, helping describe Australian literature to the rest of the world and Australia itself.

Aileen may not have known, consciously, of her mother’s doubt, but absorbed it, as if by osmosis. She wanted more than anything to be remembered as a poet, Martin writes. But her mother’s injunction, internalised from the the cradle, confused her. Her more emotionally robust younger sister was not as encumbered. Nor did she suffer, as Aileen did, the mental illnesses that also plagued their uncle, ‘Wob’, Vance Palmer’s brother. When Aileen finally published her book of poetry, World Without Strangers, it almost co-incided with her mother’s death in 1964. As if by then, Martin writes ‘she could cast off her mother’s shadow’. ( p. 265).

While Martin’s portrait of Aileen takes us into the Spanish Civil War and to the London Blitz, her writing about 1940s and 1950s Melbourne intellectual circles adds much to the historical record. In 1940, true to form for she was always in the front line when it came to doing good, Nettie Palmer volunteered to assist with the Victorian International Refugee Committee and began teaching English to newly arrived Europeans refugees – among them doctors and architects. One of them was Melbourne psychoanalyst, Hungarian doctor Clara Lazar Geroe who had arrived in Australia in March 1940 with her husband and son after intense lobbying by a group of doctors and their supporters. These included Sydney psychoanalyst Roy Coupland Winn and in Melbourne, Paul Dane, Norman Albiston, Reg Ellery and Guy Reynolds. These were Melbourne’s leading psychiatrists working at a time when new ideas and treatments were developing: electroconvulsive therapy, insulin treatment and other medications. Such methods were revolutionising psychiatric treatment – particularly for those suffering psychotic illnesses. Ostensibly this new medication relieved symptoms enough for people to be treated on an outpatient basis, rather than incarceration. But not without severe side effect and wild experimentation such as the sleeping cure; with lithium where learning about side effects was part of the process. Patients still had long spells in hospital: but months rather than years. At times treatment must have felt worse than the illness. And if Aileen told her story about her life in Spain and England it appears that her carers regarded this as part of her delusional system. Martin relates these events without judgement. Rancour is left to the reader.

Even more so upon reading Martin’s account of Aileen’s psychoanalysis with Clara Geroe. Nettie Palmer had taught English to Geroe – well enough for her to begin practising psychoanalysis in 1941. At this time Nettie recorded conversations with Geroe: about her frustration about her refugee life; her inability to move about the community without a permit and the prejudicial behaviour she had experienced at the hands of a police officer. ” You say your’re a doctor! Can’t you read the rules? Says it’splain hatred of the intellectual”. ( p. 237). Geroe’s dissatisfaction with her emigration and loss of her intellectual world is apparent.

Aileen was to remark that her treatment with Geroe did not help. In fact it made her more depressed, she said. Geroe did her own bit of undermining. She employed Helen Palmer as a typist requesting that Aileen not be told. She seems to have wanted to be part of the Palmer’s lives. One wonders whether such fragments, recorded in Nettie’s diary, are clues to another story about Geroe’s longing to connect with the world she had lost. Was it that Geroe wanted to recover the place she had left behind in Budapest more than she wanted to practice as a psychoanalyst? Or was it that her ideas about psychoanalysis and how it is practiced are no longer in favour – if they ever were? Geroe was a long way from the land of her birth, training and the accountabilities these implied. Aileen, shocked by her Spanish and English experiences, and by her subsequent emotional collapse, appears not to have found the treatment she needed.

There is much to learn from this biography about a very troubled person who tried so hard. Martin’s accumulation of evidence, carefully collated, is written without judgment but all the while building a portrait of a woman interacting with her world, conscious and unconscious. I walked the streets Aileen. I rode beside her on the battle fields and stood watching, shocked while she pulled bodies from the rubble in London. And then there was the downhill slide…

I finished this book with sadness for a life and talent not realised. I wanted more for Aileen Palmer. A biographer cannot do better.

”The Conversation’, by the way, draws its authorship from academia. With the assistance of an excellent editorial team who tolerate the vagaries of non journalists writing journalism, it covers a broad range of issues with intelligence and depth.

Matilda is living near Belsize Park Road, part of a community of German-Jewish refugees who had fled Hitler in the early years of the war. After a period working as a fire watcher during the Blitz she was employed as a clerk in an organisation assisting refugees.

Recently she has been romantically involved with two men – Robert whom she met several months ago and Monty, with whom she has been going out with for a long time. Both are serving in the military forces in some way. It means they are away, overseas, for long periods. There are long gaps between meetings.

She has been puzzled about her response to Robert with whom she had felt, upon meeting, that there was much to bind them together. Potentially. She had felt herself to be in love, but doubted her capacity for this. But then? She is writing in her second language, or her third. It is difficult to decipher meaning as a result. Her thoughts seem disjointed, her tenses are all over the place. She might be unable to write down her thoughts. The intense feelings are too much, maybe. The mind, I think, is not an orderly space. She writes,

I have some of that feeling of panic and emptiness. I vaguely feel that something is wrong with Robert and wonder at the same time whether this is not a projection on to him of my own vacillating emotions? With MontyI feel warm and comforted in that warm and paternal presence, although I often come across traits that disturb me: sentimental, self dramatising, petit-bourgeois. But there is a kernel which is good and comforting. It is not for me a feeling of ‘This is what I have been dreaming of long ago’, as it was when I met Robert, but it is positive nevertheless.

My thoughts and feelings got curiously merged; I did not know to whom my tenderness and my desire went… I was surprised how small and far away Robert became, and then again when I talked to Mother at Guildford there was only Robert. Now he is far away again. And I feel alone.

Yet I don’t want to break the physical aloneness. Why? Seriousness perhaps? Or [am I, to be honest,] merely husband hunting? I feel I must tread softly with Monty and feelings may develop. But in almost everything he does I compare him with Robert…

28th December 1943

Suddenly it seemed a terrific problem. Monty is intense and – I still cannot help feeling – his somewhat self dramatizing letters which sweep me away on waves of emotion… leave me somewhat high and dry. And then again the knowledge that I don’t want him profoundly. That I am longing for Robert and yet might perhaps just as well give him up.

I feel I ought to marry but I don’t know why; that a lover seems preferable to a husband but at the same time needs more sefl confidence in me. That I wnat children but don’t want them now and am loth to accept the responsibilities…

Matilda’s journeys into inner London, to Harley Street to see Dr W, become central to her. She needs to explore these quandaries – about men, lovers, marriage and, through her dreams, her experiences as a German Jewish woman, a refugee, in London. This is her third session with Dr W.

I tell him about my fainting fits.

W: The easiest way to escape facing a situation. There must have been an unconscious emotional crisis.

She then tells him about a dream about Robert, and her wish that W solve this problem for her. After all, H, an old friend, or perhaps another therapist, was somebody who solved my problems for me. W. wont.

W: We move round and around the same problem until we outgrow it. -We have found that Mother is a very great influence.

M : Why? Because I open the door for her. Why do I?

Matilda does not seem to like the thought that her mother is so central to her.

Session IV: Tuesday 23 May 1944

Matilda tells Dr W about her reflections between the sessions…

Matilda: On the one hand I ask Mother about things I don’t really think her competent to

. I ask her about small things and put the full responsibility upon her if things go wrong. On the other hand I don’t tell her anything at all and resent all… interference.

W: Both are symptoms of immaturity.

This comment stays with her long enough for Matilda to record. We do not know what transpired next. We are working with the gap between event and memory. What has been suppressed?

Matilda: I felt completely lost last Monday after leaving Robert.

W: That feeling can not be got rid of so quickly.

Matilda: Query: Was it sexual because of F.l?

I wonder whether she is referring to ‘Father Love’ here. Is she beginning to doubt the reality of her connection with Robert, seeing it as a enactment of her internal life?

W: No.

Matilda: Dreams. Element of conflict. Mother on one side, [her father?] on the other. Neither is myself….

Matilda’s diary is hard to follow. Like the analyst we must follow these residues of her thought and find a pattern. She seems to be freely associating as she converses with herself about herself and about her experience of Dr W.

She begins with two dreams – about a man on a bike and an association: Unsolved question: Who is the man I feel is interfering?

Dream about railway station: Conflict of wanting to make contact with Robert but not quite daring. There is a dream about a flower, her feelings; an element of the emotional connection she is making with Robert.

W: I am not interfering in your relationship with Robert in any direction.

Matilda: I feel better about it since now I don’t feel I ought to marry, and can carry on for the time being. There is probably a lot of egoism in it in that I want to keep him, (Robert) until I can do without…

This is a guest blog by Alison Moulds, second-year DPhil student at St Anne’s College, University of Oxford. Her thesis examines the construction of the doctor-patient relationship, and the formation of a professional identity, in nineteenth-century medical writing and fiction … Continue reading →

Robert Kenny, an Australian scholar, poet and writer, has a paper entitled, ‘Freud, Jung and Boas: the psychoanalytic engagement with anthropology revisited’, in the June 2015 edition of the journal Notes and Records: The Royal Society of the History of Science. It is a cogently and carefully written piece challenging accepted interpretations, if not wisdom, about Freud’s development of his social theories in the 1910s. The essay is part of a larger project Kenny has been working on since, at least, the publication of his book, The Lamb enters the Dreaming: Nathanael Pepper and the ruptured world in 2007.

Kenny’s argument centres upon Freud’s and Jung’s visit to the United States in 1909 to attend and lecture at a Congress at Cark University. It is no co-incidence, Kenny argues, that their encounter with the personage and the anthropological work of Franz Boas, who also lectured at the Congress, that there was a shift of focus to anthropological interests in the months and years immediately afterwards. In his lecture, Kenny writes, Boas challenged social darwinist ideas placing humanity of a scale of development from savage to civilised, arguing that culture was a response to environment and, essentially, throwing Spencerian theory out of the window. This culminated, in Freud’s case, the publication of Totem and Taboo and in Jung’s his book, Transformations. Kenny’s abstract reads:

Sigmund Freud’s and C. G. Jung’s turn to evolutionist anthropological material after 1909 is usually seen as a logical progression of their long-term interest in such material. It is also seen that they used this material ignorant of the significant challenges to the evolutionist paradigm underpinning such material, in particular the challenges led by Franz Boas. This paper argues otherwise: that both psychologists’ turnings to such material was a new development, that neither had shown great interest in such material before 1909, and that their turnings to such material, far from being taken in ignorance of the challenges to evolutionist anthropology, were engagements with those challenges, because the evolutionist paradigm lay at the base of psychoanalysis. It argues that it is no coincidence that this engagement occurred after their return from America in 1909, where they had come into first-hand contact with the challenges of Franz Boas.

Analysis of cultural subjectivity is central to Kenny’s historical writing. Very much influenced by the ethnohistorians, Greg Dening, Rhys Isaac and Inga Clendinnen, Kenny’s 2007 book, The Lamb Enters the Dreaming,traced the life of Nathanael Pepper of the Wotjobaluk people, who was born as the first white pastoralists were driving cattle and sheep into Victoria’s Wimmera region. The book opens one’s mind to the ways these pastoralists and the Wotjobaluk people thought about and responded to one another. Following Dening’s analysis of the encounter with cultural specificities across time and place Kenny argues for recognition of the respective, and unconsciously held, subjectivities of the pastoralistd and Wotjobaluk. If the social unconscious is framed by those unconsciously held constraints and restraints that shape action and response: if neither pastoralist or Wotjobaluk were able to find in the other affirmation of preconceptions shaped and held from birth, then it would have been difficult for either side to recognize, let alone think about the other, other than in their own terms.

Kenny’s latest essay opens further the question of how unconsciously held European subjectivity – particularly the formation of darwinist theory – influenced the way the development of the mind and the social was understood. Boas provided the inspiration and impetus to look at accepted ideas more closely, if not to see them in the first place. And in that sense Kenny’s essay also adds to a growing body of writing – Rudnytsky comes to mind – recovering the voices and writers that ultimately, and also found expression in Freud’s work.

Victorian Networkis an open-access, MLA-indexed, peer-reviewed journal dedicated to publishing and promoting the best postgraduate and early career work across the broad field of VictorianStudies. We are delighted to announce that our eleventh issue (Summer 2016) will be guest edited by Professor Sally Shuttleworth (University of Oxford), on the theme of the VictorianBrain.

In the nineteenth century, the discipline of psychology, or the science of the mind, underwent a profound reorientation: a reorientation which was both fuelled by contemporary literature, and which influenced that literature’s form and content. Investigating the mind’s workings was the joint project of such diverse parties as authors and poets; natural scientists and doctors; but also the public, as citizen scientists. Phrenology and the legibility of physiognomy remained central concerns. Simultaneously, medical research created a counterweight to eighteenth-century folk psychology and pseudoscience. Observation…

I first published this review in the Australasian Journal of Psychotherapy Vol.14.No.2, 2014. It is not a convention to reference sources in such a piece but I did so on this occasion as some of the material is contentious.

Judit Meszaros (2014), Ferenczi and Beyond: Exile of the Budapest School and Solidarity in the Psychoanalytic Movement During the Nazi Years, London, Karnac, 270 pages including bibliography and index.

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Karnac Books released the English version of Judit Meszaros’ Ferenczi and Beyond: Exile of the Budapest School and Solidarity in the Psychoanalytic Movement During the Nazi Years in early 2014. The culmination of almost twenty years research and writing, it traces the development of the Budapest School in the Great War Years and, from 1921, its dispersal to all parts of the globe as a result of war and political unrest. Hungarian psychoanalysts emigrated in several waves. The first group departed in the 1920s following the Treaty of Trianon where Hungary lost two thirds of its territory and access to the sea, and two thirds of its population, (Schwartz, 1999, p. 202). The second group, in flight from the Nazis in 1938 and 1939, emigrated with the assistance of the British and the American Refugee Funds (Jones, 1939; Meszaros, 2014). For a decade from the late 1940s departures from Hungary continued first in response to the Communist uprising and from the mid ’50s, the Hungarian Revolution.

Part of Meszaros’ purpose is to reclaim Ferenczi’s and the Hungarian contribution to the psychoanalytic movement during the twentieth century. In this respect she joins revisionist historians such as Makari (2008), and Rudnytsky (2011) in their recognition of the cost to the development of psychoanalysis resulting from Freud’s splits with significant protégés including Jung, Adler and Stekel. Infamously described by Jones as the emergence of “latent psychotic trends” (Jones, 1974, pp. 158, 185, 188-190;), Ferenczi’s differences with Freud were complicated by his final illness with pernicious anaemia which, towards the end, affected his mental functioning. Although Jones’ remarks were contested by Balint amongst others, Meszaros argues that Jones, with Freud’s complicity, did not waver from his view (Meszaros, 2003, pp. 239-253).

It is the basis of Meszaros’ view that Jones’s ambitions and his conflict with Ferenczi resulted in his ensuring that members of the Hungarian school were prevented from migrating to the United Kingdom during WW2.This becomes the prism through which Meszaros examines the flight of Hungarian Refugee analysts and the marginalisation of the Hungarian School of psychoanalysis. Meszaros provides little analysis of British refugee policy and the influence of the British Medical Association upon it, in the 1930s or 1940s. Rather there are a series of claims based upon Meszaros’s assertion that Jones, despite the energy he devoted to helping refugee analysts escape from Europe (p.148). “restricted his assistance to the sort that would keep the Hungarian analysts away from Britain”(p.159). ‘Only the Balints managed to resettle in Britain’, she continues. Other analysts such as Geza Roheim, Imre Hermann, and Edit Gyomroi – preferred to remain in Hungary but went instead the United States or in Gyomroi’s case, Ceylon. The “only people able to gain entry to Australia were the Lazar-Geroe couple and their child, as well as Elisabeth Kardos and her husband, Andrew Peto” (p.159).

Secondly – and this is her achievement – Meszaros provides important linkages between the history of psychoanalysis around the globe and the movement of refugees from Europe during the mid twentieth century. Meszaros draws on published correspondence between Sigmund Freud and Ernest Jones, and between Ferenczi and Freud. Archival material located in the United States and in Britain, including the Archives of the British Institute of Psychoanalysis also assists. Her work on the political conditions in which analysts worked and managed to survive despite the states of siege imposed by the governments of the day also underlines the importance of trauma in the development of psychoanalysis. Amongst the psychoanalysts who subsequently made a significant contribution to theoretical understanding and who departed Hungary in the early 1920s were Melanie Klein, Margaret Mahler, Rene Arpad Spitz, Franz Alexander, Therese Benedek, Georg Gero and George Deverauz. Edith Gyomroi departed, returned, and after leaving Hungary in 1939, eventually wound up in Ceylon, a British colony. Of those who remained or left and returned to Hunfary before leaving again were Michael and Alice Balint (Meszaros, 2014, p. 67). The anthropologist and psychoanalyst Geza Roheim was another. Roheim’s research with the Arrernte people of Central Australia challenged contemporary notions of the primitive by demonstrating the highly developed nature of Arrernte cultural practices and thought. Roheim’s correspondence with British psychoanalyst. John Rickman from the early 1920s shows that Rickman who was by then at the centre of the British Psychoanalytical Society provided friendship and support for Roheim in the quest to find a publisher for his books. Michael Balint, who with Ferenczi established psychoanalytic training in Hungary in 1926, also established and a low cost clinic in Budapest His patients included Clara Lazar Geroe, a Clinic Patient during her training and later the Director of the Melbourne Institute of Psychoanalysis (Swerdloff, 2002, pp.391-392), and Andrew Peto, both of whom became founding members of the Australian Society of Psychoanalysis in 1952.

Sandor Ferenczi born Sándor Fränkel in Miskolc, Austria-Hungary, in 1873, was trained in psychiatry and neurology. Through her reading of Ferenczi’s early writings Meszaros traces his thinking as he gathered experience as first as a medical practitioner and his developing interest in neurology. She describes his use of hypnosis during stints at institutions such as the Rokus Hospital and work in the neurology ward of the Erzebet Poorhouse – following the path of trainee doctors who developed their craft and profession in such public institutions. Ferenczi’s holistic approach to diagnosis and treatment; his insights into the treatment of stroke patients as well as his approach to trans sexuality and homosexuality, eugenics, intellectual disability and in the ‘myriad illnesses that do harm to the poor’ was, for Meszaros, part of his genius (pp.17-19). His work on ‘love’ predicted writings on the subject by another member of the Budapest School, Robert Bak seventy years later, Meszaros continues. And his discovery of Freud’s work helped Ferenczi clarify his thinking about the psychological mechanisms that lie behind functional symptomatology. Although uncertain about Freud’s insistence on the sexual pathogenesis of neurosis, he shared Freud’s view of psychoanalysis “as a tool for thinking about the diverse manifestations of human nature” (p.33).

Freud and Ferenczi met shortly before the first international psychoanalytic congress in 1908 and they quickly developed a deep friendship. It was on Ferenczi’s suggestion that the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) was formed in 1910. In 1912, when Adler and Stekel formally defected from Freud’s circle and Carl Jung, its president, was showing clear signs of going the same way, British Ernest Jones included Ferenczi as a member of “a secret Committee of colleagues who could be fully trusted to adhere to Freud and to the major tenets of psychoanalysis”.(“IPA History online”, 2010; Makari, 2008, pp. 282-285). The other members were Otto Rank, Hans Sachs and Carl Abraham. Ferenczi founded the Hungarian Psychoanalytical Society in 1913. When the fifth International Psychoanalytical Congress was held in Budapest in early1918 and had as its theme “The Psychoanalysis of War Neurosis”, Ferenczi’s paper on this phenomenon led to his election as president of the International Psychoanalytic Association. There were plans to develop a university department, clinic and publishing house. This was before the end of the Great War and before the imminent loss of the war was recognised. After the Congress Hungary’s fortunes suddenly changed and by the end 1918 the war was lost.

The meeting of world leaders in Paris the following year reconfigured the shape of European countries. The Ottoman empire had collapsed and the Austro-Hungarian Empire was dissolved. The very harsh and punitive Treaty of Trianon signed on June 4 1920 was disastrous for Hungary. Not only did the country lose land and people but its natural resources, industry, railways, and other infrastructure was also diminished. Access to the sea and the consequent loss of its Navy was another outcome. Food was scarce, funds unobtainable and communication with the outside world difficult (Meszaros, 2014, pp.53-54; Makari, 2008, p.324). The bitterness remains, as it also does in Austria. Together the two had been a central world power, now reduced to nought.

Hungarian Jewish people also bore the consequences. The Numerus Clauses Act, passed in 1920 aimed “to restrict the percentage of Jews at universities to 6%, a figure that represented their portion of the entire Hungarian population at the time while the share of Jewish students at the universities in Budapest and in some of the bigger cities in Hungary stood between 24% and 40%” (Kovacs, 1994 in Meszaros, 2014, p. 53). Plans for psychoanalytic clinics attached to the universities simply “evaporated” (Meszaros, 2014, pp. 55- 56). Ferenczi’s appointmenr as the world’s first professor of psychoanalysis in 1919 was revoked and he was expelled by the Budapest Medical Society in May 1920.

In these circumstances it is arguable that Ferenczi’s ability to sustain his presidency of the IPA with Budapest as its centre was severely compromised if not impossible. Historian George Makari concludes that Ferenczi,’unable to perform his duties’ passed the presidency to Vienna (Makari, 2009, p.325). Meszaros, despite outlining the conditions that beset Hungary following the war, argues that Jones’ powerful ambitions for dominance of the psychoanalytic field, as well as his rivalry with Ferenczi, spurred him to persuade Freud that Ferenczi should relinquish the role of President of the IPA. Certainly the way Jones’ personal ambitions and his actions, particularly towards Ferenczi and other Hungarian analysts, might have interacted with local political and world-wide events needs further attention. But Meszaros’s conclusion is surprising in the light of her discussion about the political and economic turmoil within Hungary at this time.

In the years following the war and the Treaty of Trianon psychoanalysis became popular amongst Budapest avant gard. New journals such as the medical Gyὁgyảszat (Therapy); the literary journal Nyugat (West) conveying psychoanalytic ideas to receptive readers added to the ferment and excitement amongst Budapest cafe intellectuals – and scholars. Meszaros explains how Ferenczi’s ideas about psychoanalysis represented a new approach, placing the functioning of the human psyche, personality development, social relations, and the complex system of relations tied to culture in a new light. His ideas reflected developments beyond Hungary. The New Education Fellowship founded in 1913 by Frenchwoman Beatrice Ensor, and the work of educationalist Maria Montessori, each stressed the need for children to learn through their own creativity and interests. Austrian August Aichhorn established a child guidance clinic in Vienna and in 1925 published his book on the treatment of juvenile delinquency: Wayward Youth (Verwahrloster Jugend). It seems that for Meszaros such ideas were entirely Ferenczi’s domain. Psychoanalysis could be used for the good of society, Ferenczi believed, “provided it was possible to optimize the restrictions, the excessive regulation and the unnecessary constraints – be they in the education of children, co existing as a society or even work with criminals.” (pp.29,36).

Ferenczi’s contributions on the transference, particularly the negative transference, on the genesis of trauma, and upon the responsibility of the analyst – particularly regarding abstinence – are significant contributions to the psychoanalytic project. The work of the Budapest School in the formation of the theory of object relations and on child and infant development, the relationship between the humanities – anthropology, literature as well as the sciences – are all touched upon and opened for further thought.

In chapters 5-8 of the book which focus on the World War Two period Meszaros describes the work of Emergency Committee on Relief and Immigration formed by the American Psychoanalytic Association, headed by Dr Lawrence Kubie. Set up a day after the Anschluss, on 13 March 1938. It rescued over 100 analysts and resettled them in the United States. Although Meszaros writes powerfully and in detail of the American response to the analyst refugees, her analysis of the British and Dominion response is lacking. Missing from her account is consideration of the 1938 Evian conference called by President Roosevelt, which essentially affirmed international reluctance to accept Jewish refugees from Europe. In Britain, in response to Kristallnacht in November 1938 the government, under pressure from the local Jewish fraternity, amongst others, restricted its intake to women and children from Europe and, essentially closed its borders to adult males (London 2000, pp. 97-141, 142). The Dominions were similarly reluctant although the Australian government under Prime Minister Bruce eventually agreed to accept 15,000 Jewish refugees (NAA: A433/1943/2/46). New Zealand and South Africa refused to accept refugees.

Right from the beginning of 1939, after Kristallnacht when the Nazi’s intentions for the Jews became clearer, the British government was pressured by the British Medical Association to not accept refugee medical practitioners. In January 1939, a letter from its Chairman, Henry Robinson warned against sponsoring “the establishment of foreign competitors in our midst” (Robinson to BMJ, 14 January 1939, p.89). After the war was over British Home Secretary Sir Samuel Hoare related how his attempt to open the way for European doctors and surgeons “was met with the obstinate resistance of the medical profession. Unmoved by the world wide reputation of the doctors in Vienna, its representatives, adhering to the strict doctrine of the more rigid trade unionists, assured me that British medicine had nothing to gain from new blood, and much to lose from foreign dilution”. He continued: “It was only after long discussions that I was able to circumvent the opposition and arrange for a strictly limited number of doctors and surgeons to enter the country and practice their profession” (Hoare, 1954, p. 240). Medically qualified psychoanalysts who wished to go to England might have faced resistance from Jones, as Meszaros suggests. But – more likely – Jones, like Sir Samuel Hoare, was up against the medical fraternity’s opposition to refugee doctors. The Australian branch of the British Medical Association followed this policy.

Meszaros’ argument that Jones resisted the idea of Hungarian refugees resettling in England is persistent, but puzzlingly, undocumented (p.139). He was not at all pleased that John Rickman had helped Michael Balint to move to England, she says (p.142). Balint’s gratitude to Rickman for his assistance, she adds, is proof that Jones’ opposition to Hungarians was well known (p.142). Read with the knowledge that Rickman had visited Hungary frequently during the previous two decades, often as a guest of Geza Roheim and was in contact with a number of Hungarian analysts, notably including Clara Lazar Geroe, Balint’s emphasis is understandable. In the light of the response of the British Medical Association to European Medical Practitioners, it is an achievement that Balint was accepted by the British Government, at all. Rickman was recognised as the liaison person between the British analysts and the Hungarians. Clara Geroe who ultimately settled in Australia recalled that When Hitler marched into Czechoslovakia Rickman travelled from London to Budapest to advise the Hungarian analysts how to get out. Jones, Rickman, the Princess Marie Bonaparte and Duncan Hall all worked together to assist this effort (Geroe, 1982, pp.354-355).

Always when histories are written sources will be found that add to or contest a particular interpretation. Certainly the discovery, in the BPAS Archive of a handwritten list of Hungarian emigres collated in 1939 ( BPAS Archive S-M-04-01) challenges the notions of Jones’ reluctance to accept Hungarian analysts, although these are every few in number. Balint, astonishingly, is listed as ‘Wishing to go to Australia’. Perhaps this plan was headed off by Jones, or perhaps Edward Glover. Maybe the listing was an error. Handwritten notes on the document affirm Balint’s decision to live in England and record his being granted a permit for Manchester (BPAS Archive S-M-04-01). While the medical fraternity in the United States was accepting of medical refugees, this was not the case in Britain or Australia. Was it that Balint, whose brilliance was acknowledged by his British colleagues, was regarded as too great a prize to lose? If Balint did indeed wish to emigrate to the Antipodes it leaves we Australians with one of the great “What if?” questions!

For some eighteen months after his arrival in England Balint was not able to gain registration. The British Psychoanalytic Society intervened. Dr Sylvia Payne, its then Chairman, approached the Tavistock on Balint’s behalf in January 1940. He was declined: rivalry from within the existing fraternity the reason. It was ‘easy to upset local practitioners when making news introductions’, the Tavistock replied (Wilson to Payne, 11 January 1940). Two years later after Balint appealed to Edward Glover for assistance, a favour was called in from one of Glover’s Glaswegian colleagues so that Balint could gain his registration (BPAS Archive S/M/04/02 (1 of 2)). This suggests that despite resistance from local practitioners, the British Psychoanalytic Society found a way for Balint to gain registration in England and continue his career. The kind of obstructive and prejudiced behaviour by Jones that Meszaros argues was the case needs further clarification.

Interestingly for Australian historians of psychoanalysis Meszaros has also devoted space to those who applied to enter Australia (pp.151-157). It is an unfortunate omission that although she cites, and publishes, correspondence between Jones, Geroe, the Australian government and another applicant to Australia, Stephen Schoenberger, and discusses, in some detail, their applications to the Australian government, “Australia” is not listed in the book’s index. It is a careless omission but one that can be rectified by the publishers.

But the problem of accuracy, at least concerning the Antipodes, deepens. New Zealand, Geroe’s first option, was closed to any refugee intake (London, 2001, pp.42, 43). Ultimately, Geroe’s appointment as the resident analyst of the newly formed Melbourne Institute of Psychoanalysis was based upon the premise that psychoanalytic practice was not a medical activity (Hall and Wilcox to Dane, 20/3/1941, BPAS No: S/M/02/01 (1 of 4)). Joy Damousi’s 2005 definitive account of psychoanalysis in Australia, Freud in the Antipodes, notes the arrival of another Hungarian émigré to Australia, Andrew Peto in 1949, ten years after he was first accepted by the Australian Government, and his departure, in 1956, for New York.

Meszaros brushes over this six to seven year period as if Peto’s time in Australia was of little consequence – a pit-stop on the way to New York. (pp. 164-166). Peto’s contribution to the development of Australian psychoanalysis, including his role in the establishment of the Sydney Institute for Psychoanalysis in 1951, and as a founder member of the Australian Society of Psychoanalysts in 1952, is not considered. Perhaps this is a reflection of Peto’s disappointment with his time in Australia. He left in 1956, not surprisingly citing difficulties over his qualifications with the British Medical Association – as it was then. As with Balint Refugee Doctors wishing to emigrate to Australia from 1939 were faced with antipathy, if not antagonism from the Australian branches of the British Medical Association who believed that European doctors would steal work from locally trained practitioners.

Overall Meszaros’ study raises many questions, not least being about the way the tumultuous events of the twentieth century shaped the development of psychoanalytic thought and practice. In tackling this Meszaros has contended with the complexity of the psychoanalytic archive and alerted readers to a rich cultural milieu which informed psychoanalysis in Hungary and, in turn, contributed to its development internationally. It is no mean feat. The archival material from which she drew is spread across the globe. Some is catalogued. In other places material remains stored in private offices awaiting donation to the public archive. Often, as in the case of the British Institute of Psychoanalysis, a document duplicated for meetings is found in several locations. Some of Meszaros’s claims, particularly concerning the motivations of Ernest Jones, are not substantiated even though she has carefully documented the context in which Jones, Freud and others acted. Her conclusion, often repeated, that Jones’ antipathy towards the Hungarians, particularly Ferenczi, does not follow from her descriptions and analysis of world and local events of the period. This is not to say that the antipathy between Jones and Ferenczi was not real enough.It is, quite simply, not the whole story.

“Redemption” – the act of setting free ; deliverance from sin and damnation; an act of restoration of a person or thing – OED Online.

A long time ago, in another life, not long after the fall of the Whitlam government, I THINK I worked with Christine Piper’s father. This was at the domestic end of the public service, running, amongst other things, the tea lady service in a large government department. It would have been in the early months of his marriage. I remember overhearing long phone calls from his desk on the other side of the room as my colleague tried to help his newish wife, recently arrived from Japan with their new baby, to cope with the vagaries of Australian culture. It is hardly surprising the daughter of such a marriage would be writing about transcultural experience. Intimacy, identity and the transition from from one culture to another are at the centre of Christine Piper’s award winning novel: After Darkness.

This is Christine Piper’s first novel, written as a requirement for her degree in creative arts, and winner of the Vogel Award for 2014. Essentially historical in nature, Piper uses the story of Dr Tomokuzo Ibaraki to explore themes of loss and transition, pride, fall and ultimately, redemption. Her interest is also upon a traumatic period in Japanese history in the twentieth century – experiments in germ warfare but her focus is upon the mind of Ibaraki, a doctor participant in this program. Piper’s vision concerns what happens within the minds of those who participate in atrocity. Here, Ibaraki is ‘Everyman’: a Japanese where honor and obedience matter most. When he fails he flees.

First a bit of history. After Japan bombed Darwin in northern Australia in 1942, Prime Minister John Curtin said ‘This country shall remain forever the home of the descendants of those people who came here in peace in order to establish in the South Seas an outpost of the British race’. In the earlier years of the war Japanese residents in Australia were interned if they were considered to be a threat; in the later years they were rounded up and imprisoned ‘en masse’. At its peak 12,000 people were interned in eight large camps: three in New South Wales, two in Western Australia and one each in South Australia, Victoria and Queensland. Records show there were at least five smaller ‘holding camps’ and a number of smaller camps around the country. Loveday the internment camp in South Australia at the centre of Christine Piper’s novel, After Darkness, housed up to five thousand people at a location near Barmera on the Murray River in the Riverland district of South Australia. The site was selected because of its nearby transportation (rail and road), its irrigated fields and because both electricity and telephone communications were available. Residents – tradespeople and professionals – Germans, Italians, Chinese from Formosa and Japanese were housed in four separate compounds linked by areas of land that were cleared and cultivated for sale.

At the beginning of the novel Tomakazu Ibaraki, a Japanese National, is working as a doctor to the Japanese community in the pearl fishing town of Broome north-western Australia.He goes about his duties carefully and methodically, detached enough, it seems, maintain professionalism. It is not clear at first why he is there. Dedicated to his career he is an arrogant man who believes in his superiority and is careful to sustain form. Because he is of Japanese birth and nationality, Ibaraki is imprisoned by the Australian authorities after the Japanese bombing of Darwin in 1942 and sets about working out his days the camp hospital. He is assisted by Sister Bernice, an Australian born nun who has been sent to the camps by her Order. Her figure moves from the edges of Ibaraki’s mind to its centre. She is mother and potential love in one – a counterpoint to the world of hospital and military officials, Australian and Japanese. Ibaraki, increasingly, and surprising to himself, distances himself from them.Ibaraki learns Sister Bernice has a life and family in Geraldton, Western Australia. As she comes and goes from the camp, in and out of Ibaraki’s life, he begins to apprehend his feelings for her.

The use of ‘flashbacks’, Piper’s weaving of the text back and forth between past and present, slowly takes the reader into the structures of Ibaraki’s mind. She shows how his real thoughts begin to break through the social forms he maintains. Memories, despite his efforts to keep them at bay, begin to emerge. There is the death of his brother, an airman shot down in the course of his war service, and the person to whom Ibaraki is closest. He has a wife, Kayoko, left behind in Japan. He is estranged from her – a result of Ibaraki’s dedication to his work and her belief that his preoccupation and distancing of her is the result of an affair. Kayoko cannot see beyond her world into the mind of another.

The truth is all the more worse because Ibarako has signed a secrecy agreement to work in a new laboratory developed by the Japanese government. Piper shifts the swathes of curtains making passage to the offices at the centre of Ibarako’s work where he has signed on as a doctor in the Japanese germ warfare program. Here people – men, women, children and babies, prisoners of war, convicts and disabled have been, amongst other practices deliberately infected with bubonic plague, or typhus, or cholera. Others have been exposed to extreme heat or cold and their bodily reactions, to the point of death, observed. It was, and remains, a deeply troubling for Japanese people as Piper also observed in her award winning essay, ‘Unearthing The Past’ in 2014. Piper writes of the horror without flinching, describing each at their moment of death. It is Ibaraki’s task to dissect their bodies for analysis. Affected by one of them in particular – a small boy – who reminds him of his brother, perhaps, Ibaraki is unable to obey the orders of his commanding officers. He is dismissed as a failure. Leaving Japan saves face.

For some at Loveday, the internment camp to which Ibaraki is sent, isolation from their country prompts assertion of Japanese superiority and culture. Others, the half Japanese and Australian born Japanese are less sure, more overtly caught between cultures if not loyal to their country of birth. Amongst Ibaraki’s Australian patients are those who have perpetrated atrocities and who, like him are traumatised by their actions. It is to wonder about what it means to be free of shibboleths that hold one to a certain path and what it takes to loosen them.

For Quaker philosopher Margaret Fell,’personal salvation depends upon the mind discerning the light within and then diligently keeping to it’. Christine Piper’s concern, the freeing of a troubled mind imprisoned within the constraints and restraints, conscious and unconscious, of his internal world, is ultimately political and ethical. While internment in a country culturally far different to his own also fails to mirror unconsciously held constraints and restraints upon thought and behaviour that enable continuity of being, it is the internal collapse of these that enables Ibaraki to reconcile his various forms and roles – son, husband, doctor, sportsman, brother, loyal employee – into a new and different position. Sister Bernice’s presence during this process her coming and going, represents this new moral and humane, if not theological position. It is one form of heroism, opening the way for further exploration.

This is not to suggest that Australians, or members of any other culture do things better than anyone else. Piper is arguing for a different, ethical position, where living occurs in the space between the rights and wrongs, whys and wherefores of one action or another. In this respect her study of the intimate workings of the mind of a single person resonates with the theological and political morality implicit in the work of American author, Marilynne Robinson. It will be interesting to see what evolves from this work.

In March 1939 psychiatrist Dr Anita Muhl, newly arrived in Melbourne from the United States, was contracted for three years to educate and lecture medical and other professionals about developmental psychology and psychiatry. She was in the process of setting up her office in St Kilda Road when Dr Kora Singer, a recent arrival from Vienna, wrote to her:

Mr Penhalluriack, the Passport and Control Officer was kind enough to mention your name and to tell me you might be looking for a part-time assistant. Therefore I beg to offer my services. I am a Viennese lady-doctor and passed my medical degree in Vienna in 1932. After that, I was working for four years as a resident medical officer in the General Hospital in Vienna where I spent almost a year on the Clinic for Psychiatry.

Clearly Kora Singer, an Austrian doctor, had found respect and support from government officials who went out their way to help her. Not so the British Medical Association in Australia. In 1939, imagining that an influx of refugee doctors would undermine the quality of medical practice in Australia, the BMA was lobbying the government to prevent overseas trained doctors from practising unless they undertook further training. Muhl could not practice either. Her three year contract was underwritten by philanthropist and doctor Una Cato. To make ends meet Singer had accepted a part time job as a laboratory assistant at the Queen Victoria Hospital for Women.

The main source for Kora’s story is Peter Singer’s lucidly written: ‘Pushing TimeAway‘, Kora Singer needed the work. She and her husband Ernst, a businessman, were trying to raise enough money to support the emigration of Kora’s parents David and Amalie Oppenheim and Ernst Singer’s parents from Jewish Vienna. They had the visas but not, it seems the will although Kora and Ernst had departed for Australia in August 1938, six months after the Anchluss, when Hitler and his army had taken Vienna. David Oppenheim, Kora’s father, a teacher, scholar and humanist thinker, had lost the teaching post at the school he had taught for thirty years. After Kristallnacht in November 1938, when the Nazis had destroyed Jewish homes, businesses and places and worship, matters had become far more pressing. But David, who had fought in the First World War, and who had been awarded medals for distinguished service, thought he was untouchable. So many of his army comrades had thought likewise. Besides he was reluctant to leave his beloved library. The Oppenheims also did not wish to put financial pressure on their Australian family by emigrating – even though by March 1939, Kora had found another job.

Peter Singer’s account of the lives of his grandparents, David and Amalie Oppenheim is also about his own journey as he discovers something of his origins and a like mind in his grandfather. Busy with his work as a philosopher and ethicist, Peter Singer did not turn his mind to his grandparents’ story until he was close to sixty. When he began to read David’s letters and follow his career, he discovered a shared interest in understanding the problems of humanity. David, a classical scholar, an expert in Greek mythology, in sexuality and cultural life, was interested in the symbolism within them for understanding contemporary human life and problems. His discovery of psychoanalysis in the early 1900s complemented and expanded his knowledge: he was, for a short time, a member of Freud’s Wednesday Group. Author of some sixteen published articles he co wrote an article with Freud – Dreams in Folklore. Oppenheim eventually departed from Freud, choosing follow Adler, another member of the circle, who split with Freud – not particularly because he objected to Freud’s theory but more in response to Freud’s poor treatment of Adler and others whose views differed from his. He became an editor the Adlerian Journal of Individual Psychology.

During his research visits and discussions amongst the family Singer was astounded to discover a cache of letters between his grandparents, David and Amalie. In this section Singer lucidly explicates the quality and nature of his grandparents’ thinking and perception of their world. Informed by science and the humanities, their interest was not upon the quantifiable nature of the psychologies but the inner mystery and uncertainties of being human.In the woman who became his wife David discovered a kindred spirit. In these youthful years both were exploring their sexuality, and love for members of the same sex as well as heterosexual relationships. Were they both homosexual? Singer lets the matter rest, exploring in detail their feelings and thinking about the nature of love. For both love between women and between men was one of the finest forms and part of appreciating beauty. Amalie was the only one in whom David could confide his innermost thoughts and feelings on matters of love – platonic, spiritual, sexual and emotional. Amalie was no intellectual slouch either. Also a university graduate in science she let go a brilliant career to marry David. He in turn chose against the uncertainties of an academic career for the security of a teaching position in a boys school in Vienna. It brought in enough money for the couple to start a family. He remained in his teaching post at the same school for thirty years until Hitler came to power and expelled Jewish people from the professions. Throughout Singer lucidly explicates the quality and nature of his grandparents’ thinking and perception of their world. Informed by science and the humanities, their interest was not upon the quantifiable nature of the psychologies but the inner mystery and uncertainties of being human.

Peter Singer’s handling the story of David’s and Amalie’s lives in Vienna after Hitler came to power is breathtakingly sad. For a reader who ‘knows’ what befell Jewish people in Germany, David’s reluctance to leave the country and his beloved library seems to be and ignorant blindness. But then no one knows what is going to happen next in their lives; it is only with hindsight that we learn. Peter Singer writes of this and David’s illness with diabetes, of periods in hospital and his slow, slow convalescence which delayed and continued to delay the couple’s departure. They had long been granted Visas for Australia and, before David’s illness occurred, had intended to travel with their son-in-laws parents. But this too was delayed on the Singer side when a member of the family was arrested by the Gestapo for possessing a contraband camera.

The matter of fact way Singer writes of this period, I think, underlines the gravity and horror of their situation. In 1943 the couple were transported to Thereseinstadt. David died shortly afterwards. Amalie survived: through what means Singer does not know. She eventually made it to her daughters in Melbourne, Australia where she remained until her death in 1955.By then Kora Singer had gained her registration and was practising.

Somehow in the mean-time, before the war finally ended, news got through to Australia that David had died in the camp. His death notice appeared in the Argus on 1 September 1944. Ignored by most of the population who knew little, if anything, of the death camps, this little notice is a reminder of the humanity and culture lost to Hitler’s megalomania. It is a reminder too of the damage to humanity of totalitarian regimes such as Nazi Germany – and of ignorance.

Freud, Sigmund and Oppenheim, David, ‘Dreams in Folklore’, Dreams in Folklore – published in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited by James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–1974), Vol. 12, pp. 177–203.

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